"And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be? ... You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there King was to wake you'd go out -- bang! -- just like a candle!"

"Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise."

"Well it's no use your talking about waking him when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

10 Poems, first teachers [meme]

in no particular order:

T. S Eliot, Four QuartetsJames Wright, "With the Shell of a Hermit Crab"Robert Lowell, "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"Pablo Neruda, "Walking Around"James Dickey, "The Sheep Child"Percy Shelley, "The Witch of Atlas"Genesis, King James BibleSylvia Plath, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"James Merrill, "The Octopus"Milton, Paradise Lost

Where are the women, I wonder, when I look at this list. Where are the men and women of color? The world poems, the Southwest poems, the border poems, the experimental poems? --Not part of my education in the beginning, truthfully. My training was almost purely canonical until I got to grad school. I suppose that's the hazard of being an English major at a college that believes in teaching literary tradition, and Smith College did, at the time. Don't know if that's changed. That was 10 years ago. --Anyway, I don't regret it. I love these poems.